"We're seeing that many of the people who are buying Kindles also own an LCD tablet," said Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos in a canned statement.

Although Bezos didn't refer to the iPad by name – it still being the holidays, direct "in yo' face" trash talking remains rudely unseasonable – it is unlikely that he had the Dell Streak or even the Samsung Galaxy Tab on his mind.

"Customers report using their LCD tablets for games, movies, and web browsing and their Kindles for reading sessions," he continued. "They report preferring Kindle for reading because it weighs less, eliminates battery anxiety with its month-long battery life, and ... works outside in direct sunlight, an important consideration especially for vacation reading."

That last argument, you may recall, was raised earlier by Amazon in an anti-iPad advertisement that depicted a Kindle-reading, bikini-clad lass snickering at an iPad user as the sun's glare ruined his poolside reading.

The Kindle wasn't the only success story that Amazon chose to tell in Monday's announcement. On "Cyber Monday" – the shorthand term for the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, during which online shopping is said to be at its peak – sales at Amazon's online store averaged 158 items per second.

Just to put that number in perspective, if Amazon could keep that sales rate going all year it'd peddle about five billion products between now and Boxing Day 2011. ®